Denver and the West

Climate change leads Inuits to team up with CSU to predict weather and ice

Warm affront

WINDS OF CHANGE. From left, Kelly Elder, Joelie Sanguya and Glen Liston work on a weather station in
northeast Canada. Liston is a research scientist at CSU. (Henry Huntington, Special to The Denver Post)

Inuit hunters fighting to continue their traditional lifestyle in the melting Arctic have turned to Colorado scientists for help.

Cracks open unexpectedly in sea-ice routes the Inuit rely on to track polar bears, caribou and other animals. Each year, the ice melts earlier and freezes later, forcing a shift from dog sleds to boats that require costly fuel.

Elders' once-reliable predictions, based in part on touching and tasting sea ice, increasingly fail.

Today the scientists, led by climate-modeling veteran Glen Liston, are installing a super-sensitive network of weather stations near an isolated community on Baffin Island in northeast Canada called Kangiqtugaapik (pop. 1,000).

They have launched an $800,000 project, backed by the National Science Foundation, aimed at understanding environmental change from an Inuit perspective.

The Inuit "don't talk much about how cold it is. They talk about the wind. It affects how they navigate," said Liston, 51, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.

Liston has devoted decades to studying how wind courses over rock and glaciers, developing intricate meteorological models of the polar world. He's passionate about traversing Earth's most frigid snowfields and fjords to collect data for honing his models.

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A colleague, geographer Shari Gearheard of the Boulder-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, is posted at Kangiqtugaapik, coordinating sociological studies. As part of the project, Inuit visit Colorado on cultural exchanges. Liston commutes from Colorado.

Three weather stations installed so far gather wind speed, wind direction and other data in an effort to help navigate climate change. A fourth station is planned. The project also collects data from an Environment Canada station at the Kangiqtugaapik Airport.

DAY AT THE OFFICE. Scientists and residents take a break as they snowmobile to meteorological tower sites in northeast Canada. (Kelly Elder, Special to The Denver Post)

Inuit existence for centuries has revolved around hunting polar bears, narwhals, caribou and seals, with children traditionally trained from when they are tots to read weather.

A new telephone hotline and website deliver latest readings in the Inuktitut language. The data is downloaded from satellites at Liston's CSU lab, then routed through National Snow and Ice Data Center computers.

"Every weekend, I check it out," said Joanna Qillaq, a woman's community group leader and addiction counselor, whose family hunts and gathers berries from a cabin two hours from town. "If the weather's getting warmer and warmer, I know we are going to have problems. For the polar bears, maybe we'll have to hunt more" to find them.

Elders used to be able to say, with reasonable certainty, whether stormy winds at Kangiqtugaapik were masking calm conditions for hunting in fjords to the west, she said.

"Now the ice melts earlier. In spring, that makes it more difficult to move around," she said. "In fall, when we're supposed to have the ice, it doesn't freeze until the end of September or early October."

This isn't the first time the Inuit have had to adapt. Canada's government relocated semi-nomadic hunters in the 1950s, forcing them into permanent settlements near airstrips, sending children to residential schools in cities. Keeping their language became a struggle — which is intensifying amid today's push for Arctic oil-and- gas development. Canadian authorities' regulation of the number of bears and narwhals the Inuit can kill rankles leaders, who believe they know better how to maintain healthy animal populations.

"People have observed that the weather changes more quickly," said Gearheard, one of four lead scientists on the project. "Hunters and those who live on the land are the most affected."

For example, knowing whether winds will kick up waves, preventing docking in rocky fjords, is a day-to-day necessity, she said. "The biggest concern is that, if the changes continue, they make sure they have access to their food."

An annual sealift and flown-in foods often are unhealthy, she said. "Getting that food (from hunting) is super important, not just for nutrition but for cultural reasons."

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To maintain the weather stations, Liston and a local crew cross sea ice and camp as far as 70 miles from Kangiqtugaapik. A polar bear bent a pole at one station, but all are working.

The data help refine climate-modeling methods designed for wider use. Liston said he has enough data now to compare shifting patterns in the Arctic, where overall snow volume has increased, with patterns in Colorado — and eventually pinpoint shifts that may be relevant for ski areas.

"It doesn't do much good to know there's going to be more snow in Colorado. We need to know where that snow is going to be," Liston said. "That's what my modeling does — take it to a scale where it will be relevant to people."

For now, Inuit leaders still are sliding out dog sleds, waiting for temperatures to drop. Some female polar bears spotted this summer had two cubs, locals observed, and unlike other areas in the Arctic the bears near Kangiqtugaapik appear abundant and plump.

Not all kids who play baseball are uniformed with fancy script across their chests, traveling to $1,000 instructional camps and drilled how to properly hit the cut-off man. Some kids just play to play.